KDE Will Now Safely Spin Down External Hard Drives When Unmounting

Fixing a seven year old bug since the KDE4 days, KDE will now spin down external hard drives unmounting the drives to help stave off possible data loss / corruption.

KDE has unmounted external hard drives but not caused these drivers to stop spinning -- basically, powering off the drive. In some cases this lack of powering down the external HDDs could cause problems as outlined by this 2011 bug report requesting said functionality. Most other Linux distributions out there have powered down external drives when ejecting/unmounting except for KDE.

Beginning with the upcoming KDE Frameworks 5.52, the UDisks2 call is in place to power down the drive on removal, if the drive supports this behavior.

Nate Graham who continues providing weekly summaries of KDE fixes/enhancements also noted that in Plasma 5.15.0 is the ability to download/install new wallpaper plugins straight from the wallpaper chooser. There have also been a number of fixes to KDE Discover, including the ability to handle Snap URLs and other Snap/Flatpak handling improvements. KDE has also seen a number of Baloo file indexer improvements, user interface polishing for different KDE components, and a variety of other enhancements.

More details on the latest KDE changes via this blog post.